


The World Entire

by Riathel



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Aziraphale is a Healer but he is not a Doctor, Biblical Reinterpretation, Blood and Gore, Book Characterisation, Childbirth, Dark Comedy, Historical, M/M, Medical Procedures, Not TV Canon Compliant, Protective Aziraphale (Good Omens), Sad with a Happy Ending, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-08
Updated: 2019-06-08
Packaged: 2020-04-12 16:25:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19135771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Riathel/pseuds/Riathel
Summary: Aziraphale masters himself over six thousand years. Crowley is an immutable, irritating, rebellious constant for every damn bit of it.





	The World Entire

**Author's Note:**

> _Why was man created alone? Is it not true that the creator could have created the whole of humanity? But man was created alone to teach you that whoever kills one life kills the world entire, and whoever saves one life saves the world entire._
> 
>  
> 
> —paraphrased from the Talmud
> 
> _"Come off it. Your lot get ineffable mercy," said Crowley sourly._
> 
> _"Yes? Did you ever visit Gomorrah?"_
> 
> _"Sure," said the demon. "There was this great little tavern where you could get these terrific fermented date-palm cocktails with nutmeg and crushed lemongrass-"_
> 
> _"I meant afterwards."_
> 
> _"Oh."_
> 
> —quoted from Good Omens
> 
>  **Warnings for this specific chapter (and the whole fic):** gore, torture, oppressive regime/s, non-graphic childbirth, and well, you know, it's Sodom and Gomorrah. What did you think would happen?

**The Dead Sea, or thereabouts, 2070 B.C.**

The first good part of Aziraphale cracks when God burns Sodom and Gomorrah.

Gabriel tells him to redeem Gomorrah, or She would extend Her ineffable mercy.

He never learns who had the job of redeeming Sodom.

He never thinks to ask.

He gets twenty years to guide them into Her grace.

It won’t be enough. But he doesn’t know that. He is filled with the confidence of the Lord. He will succeed. He has been told to succeed.

 

* * *

 

It’s the first time Aziraphale presses into a human city. They are not what he has been expecting. He can remember Adam and Eve, nubile and unformed, terrified and basic. It has been nearly two thousand years since, and the people of Gomorrah are vibrant with life. They’re cautious of a pale, blond, ever-smiling stranger who speaks Elamite, Sumerian and Hebrew without an accent, but gradually they warm to him as he insinuates himself in bar discussions, on the streets, anywhere people gather.

He talks openly to anyone who will listen, men, women, children. It’s easier with women, although they hush him at first with wide, darting eyes, he uses a little of his divine influence to convince them that his words are genuine, that he is genuine. They will all be saved by the love of Her Good Name. His use of the feminine pronoun for the Almighty endears him to women, as much as it alienates him from the men. He learns quickly to call God His Lord in the presence of men.

They are fragile things, all of them. They don’t understand the nature of divinity, the existence beyond, between, and in all genders simultaneously.

Living on Earth for so long, he has settled into his preferred, male gender. He even finds that the people of Gomorrah are more understanding that he has not taken a wife and shows no interest in bedding women. (Not that he would ever consider sleeping with a human male from a town under his protection. Humans as a whole are so young and so brittle - he fears that he would break whoever he chose.)

Aziraphale spends years searching for demonic influence in the city, waiting as the Elamite rule extends and extends with abject cruelty. The extension of their empire from the Gulf of Persia has them restless, coming down with ruthless efficiency on any whisper of discontent. King Gir-Namme feels like a cloaked presence around the town. Aziraphale privately considers whether or not the King would even know what happens here when he has never left the city of Susa. If the local leadership have ever even met him, filled as they are with his name, with his decrees, with his authority.

It’s not the people of Gomorrah who need to be returned to grace, he knows, it’s their leadership. And they are irredeemable. The few Israelites who did not flee when the city was occupied have struggled. There are beatings. Public whippings. He watches as a man, the supposed leader of a rebellious sect, is lashed between two horses. The way his limbs pop out of their sockets, right before they rip at the joint, fills Aziraphale with nauseated dread.

But he can save the people.

He is charged to return to Heaven with only thirty worthy souls — he finds hundreds. He consoles, encourages and heartens by turns. It’s difficult to be aloof from humans when he is faced with the microcosms of their tiny, daily lives.

It is more difficult, still, that they fear death with such joyless, aching fervour.

 _Perhaps this is their sin_ , he thinks, lingering on the fringes of the first funeral he has ever attended. _They don’t know that they will be Saved, if they believe._

His comforting words, intended to dry their tears and fill them with love, do not have much of an effect on the man’s family. They don’t speak to him afterwards — they leave Gomorrah, in fact, without another word to anyone.

It frustrates him, their stubborn unwillingness to believe in life after death. Their inability to look beyond, to eternity — to consider that their souls may be more important than the sacks of flesh they are born, eat, fuck, and die in.

But they are _beautiful._

As they grow to accept him, he finds they create images, mouldings out of clay. The potter’s wife brings him a moulding, at his polite request, of a crudely made dove. They sing, early in the morning, all through the day, and late at night. Songs that have been passed down through family lines, that have spun out into communities and further, further, until people have ceased to remember who had first sung them.

They can _dance_.

He is enraptured. He loves them, of course - because that’s what he is and what he does. But they are so much more than what he was told, than what he has assumed. He is still an outsider, in the ways that count, and he spends most of his time watching them from the sidelines, filled with a tender adoration such that he has not known except towards Her.

This, too, changes.

One night, three years into his appointment, he hears frantic knocking on the door of his room. The door is a thin bit of wood, hastily propped up so he has some privacy from curious eyes, so that he can let his wings unfurl in the sanctity of solitude — the locals are polite enough to knock, at least.

He hadn’t been sleeping, he’d been sitting and staring at the wall, trying to consider the spider-web paths of his next actions. It’s an endlessly political existence. Caution begets success. A woman had been stoned to death yesterday, for adultery. The murder still curls beneath his tongue. It is not for these humans to judge what constitutes _sin_ , and a spark of blue-fire flares hot in his chest. It dissipates at the knock, knock, knocking, which is hard enough to make the wood groan.

He opens the door to find a brown-skinned young woman with a hot flush to her face. She had come, fast, and far, given her shaking legs and quick breath.

“Sara,” he says in Hebrew. She nods, tightly, at the acknowledgement of her birth.

“Please,” she says, still out of breath, in thick Elamite. She’s afraid of being overheard, even here. “Please, I have been with Miriam. She is ill, she is very —" she sucks in a quick, shuddering breath, “I think her baby is coming. None of the Elam will help us. And, and I’ve never — Joseph thought that you might know things.”

He has no idea, Earthly, Heavenly or otherwise, how to deliver a human child. The very thought fills him with a primordial terror.

“Please,” she repeats desperately, “I know you are a man, but you have travelled to many places, you have seen many things. Unknowable things. You are a friend,” she adds, her eyes wet.

“I’ll come,” he replies, his chest tight. Her face clears with relief.

It’s about as bad as he anticipates. Miriam is on death’s door, her dark skin blanched with fever and sweat. She is barely conscious. He checks her for sickness and finds a deep, churning ooze eating away at her insides, turning her stomach, her intestines, her womb to cancerous rot. She will die, and so will the baby, he knows. He knows that they both should die — this is the way it should go, the way of the world. This is the nameless cancer that spreads, he also knows, can feel it rotting through her veins — this is the plague that will extend dripping fingers to Sara, and Joseph, and their neighbours. They are poor. They live close together. They share food, water, places to relieve waste.

They will all die, he knows. This is the way of things.

Joseph looks at him, with the sort of vacant stare of the truly terrified. “Can you help her?” he asks, his deep voice thin and shaken. “Please.” This man, who towers over him on a normal day, who is healthy, and whole, and vibrant, who is now trembling and ashen with anticipated grief, sinks to his knees and grasps at Aziraphale’s hand. “I beg you.”

 _God forgive me,_ he thinks.

Even with his supernatural miracles, his internal prayer of  _please God preserve this woman do not let her come to you just yet please let me heal her let me heal her let me heal them all_ , it takes five hours of bloody, inelegant toil. Sara helps him, and Joseph brings wet, filthy rags that he miracles clean before using. Neither of them notices, they’re so consumed with Miriam’s pain. Joseph holds her hand and Sara — with a curious, scared glance at Aziraphale — gently takes her other hand and kisses her brow.

They’re not sisters, he knows.

 _It’s not a sin_ , he wants to say, but he’s finding it hard to do much but count and pray.

Dawn breaks. He is sitting at their table, legs tucked underneath his body. His blond hair is frayed, and there’s a grit of _something_ underneath his neat fingernails. He’s half-dozing, genuinely exhausted for the first time since he unravelled the milky-way. Miriam is resting in bed, weak but alive. Sara is sleeping on the floor of their tiny house, her eyelids dark with fatigue. Joseph has long since left for the quarries.

He can hear the baby crying. Miriam stirs, hushes her, and begins to feed the newborn girl. “Channah,” Miriam whispers to her, smiling, “my Channah.”

 _What a lovely sound,_ he thinks, and smiles, and sleeps.

 

* * *

 

Women learn quickly that he has a gift for delivering healthy children and, as importantly, has never let a single woman die during birth. Even those on death’s door seem to miraculously recover. The number of pregnant women astonishes him at first, as not all of them are married before the eyes of God and some of them have concealed it with a skill and efficacy that is frightening.

The overwhelming feeling that he is meddling settles in his stomach like a stone settled above a precipice, but he does not turn a needy soul away.

This gives him a certain, unexpected popularity. The gratitude of women, and men, extends to hosting him for supper even during his initial insistence that he doesn’t eat. The look of hurt on their faces is enough to get him to learn how.

Food is, as equally unexpectedly, very good.

It continues. Life continues. He loses count of the lives he saves. It extends, until he’s setting bones and fractures, trying to be human and failing when he sees a horrifically mangled arm that would otherwise have needed amputation.

They never start to revere him, but there is a gentle, loving respect to the way that the locals call him theirs. The healer who has come from nowhere, who has no family, no ties to land or city, who is too pale for the desert sun, who speaks with curiously flat sentences, and who can perform miracles.

 

* * *

 

Around year eleven, he hears more than whispers of rebellion and thinks that this is it. They will be saved, by themselves.

Distracted as he is by the overwhelming closeness of humanity, by his main task and the side tasks that he has come to develop (of delivery, of eating, of healing) he does not fail to notice in the twelfth year a snake trailing into town, directly to the nearest tavern.

Mostly because the snake slithers right up to his table and says, “Aziraphale!” in a bright voice. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“Er,” Aziraphale replies, torn between politeness and enmity and settling instead on incoherence.

The man-who-was-a-snake —  _Crawly_ , he remembers, with a touch of irritation — is here, to undo all his good work and, what’s worse, the demon’s not even being  _sneaky_ about it.

No. The demon’s drinking a cocktail. And sitting down. At his table.

“What’re you doing near the Dead Sea this time of year?” Crawly doesn’t bother to speak a human language - instead, he’s spitting unformed, corrupted Verses of a very specifically grating dialect at him.[1]

“Can you speak — something normal instead? Something human?” he asks as politely as he can with a clenched jaw.

Crawly swallows the rest of his mouthful of drink and says in perfect Hebrew, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“The Lord’s good works,” he says, primly, also in Hebrew. The language draws curious glances from the other patrons — once they see it’s the odd, pale man and his new, equally pale friend, they shrug to themselves and continue their conversations. Nobody can touch the healer, the people reason. He’s good luck.

“Oh,” Crawly says, “That sounds dull. Not doing much sightseeing, then?”

“No,” he says, a bit more forcefully than he intends, “what are _you_ doing here?”

Crawly’s tongue darts out of his mouth into his drink. A nearby patron stares at him; the man then looks into his own drink, shakes his head in stunned amazement and self-disgust, and stands up to leave the bar. “Wandering. Tempting. The usual.” He sounds bored and shifts the subject again. “This drink is very good — do you know the recipe?”

“Crawly,” Aziraphale says in a low voice, “I am _very interested_ as to why you are _here in Gomorrah_ at this _very moment_.”

If the serpent notices the polite menace in his voice, he doesn’t show it. He smiles, instead, a wicked grin. “I told you. I’m sssightseeing. Travelling. You know, you should give it a go, I think you’d enjoy it. Take a sick day or something — you get those? I can’t remember, it’s been so long.”

Aziraphale toys with a mad idea for too short a time, before he says in pure Verse, “ _Azazel, I ask you to_ —”

“It’s Crawly,” the demon interrupts, sipping delicately at his cocktail, “Were you trying to compel me? How  _funny_ ,” he says, his grin stretching until he’s showing far too many teeth for a friendly smile. It doesn’t seem like he thinks it’s funny at all. “I haven’t heard that name in _eons_.”

He’s not actually certain how a fight between them would go which is, to his orderly mind, a pretty bad oversight.

People, the perishable kind, would definitely be hurt in the crossfire.

“I asked politely,” he says, feeling guilty despite himself. “I’m, er. I’m sorry.”

“Ah,” Crawly says, his nasty grin softening, “I’ll call it even if you let me know something.”

“What?” he asks, suspicious.

“Is Her Lordship going to obliterate the ever-loving Hell out of these two cities?” Crawly asks like they're chatting about the weather tomorrow and whether it might rain.

“No!” Aziraphale says quickly.

“Because,” Crawly continues, “I’ve got to get ssseveral more of these drinks in my system if so.”

“Nobody’s destroying anything,” the angel says sharply.

The demon drains the last of his drink. “Because of your good works,” he says, suddenly quite sly. His mouth curls in a conspiratorial little grin.

It’s very difficult to be in the presence of a demon, Aziraphale thinks. Very confusing. He is constantly conflicted by disparate feelings around this snake. Right now he’s half-flustered, half-preening - and Heaven above, those are twin paths to damnation.

“You must have been at it a while,” Crawly continues in the same purring timbre. “A year? Two?”

“Twelve,” he says. Then he closes his eyes. Heaven preserve him from his pride and ego.

“Very impressive,” the demon says, drawing out the sibilants. “But,” his tone changes abruptly, his grin slides away, and he’s almost sincere, “Let’s be honest — when will the actual destruction happen?”

Aziraphale stares.

“I have some real estate I’d have to shift,” Crawly says, by way of explanation, “you know — it’s a Hell of a thing trying to sell a house when it’s raining blood and people are tearing their eyes out in exultation of Her worship. Can really ruin a good deal.”

“It’s not happening,” Aziraphale says. “They’re not being destroyed. They’re good people. They’ve been redeemed in Her eyes.”

“Oh,” Crawly says, “Shit.” He laughs and covers his mouth immediately with a hand. His eyes are wide. “Oh, shit, you actually believe that.” He bursts out laughing again. Aziraphale stares at him sullenly as he wipes tears from his eyes. “Ah, fuck. I thought you were joking. Oh, wow.”

“I’d really rather you leave,” Aziraphale says quietly, a touch of frost darkening his voice. “Immediately.”

“Well, if it’s not going to happen, I don’t have anywhere to go,” Crawly says, regarding him with unblinking eyes. “But it is going to happen. You do know that. Right?”

“You aren’t welcome here.”

“Ooh,” Crawly hisses, “Tesssty.” He raises a hand as Aziraphale rises. “Ah, ah, ah, I’ll go if you want me to. I’m not here for a fight — just, let me ask one last question.”

“Speak.”

“Have you asked Her?” Crawly asks, studying him.

Aziraphale doesn’t reply.

After a moment, Crawly snorts and rises. “Might want to think about that,” he adds, and then he’s gone.

 

* * *

 

The angel assumes Crawly has been sent to set fire all his carefully laid plans. He combs the city for the snake, leaving no bush uninspected, warning children to be careful of the tall grass and play close to their houses.

Nothing happens. Crawly is as good as his word. Which means next to nothing to Aziraphale. He stays on his guard, walking in the dead of night, and the light of day, and the hue of dawn and dusk, a question thrumming in his veins and beating at his throat:

_Have you asked Her?_

Of course not. Who asks God Her plans? It's the sort of recklessly stupid thing he expects from a fallen angel. One who fell, if he remembers correctly, for asking "why?"

 _Stupid_ , Aziraphale thinks, pacing the length of the city. It's been three days hence. Gomorrah is dark and redolent with sleep, dim fires smouldering along the wide and narrow streets. A cat tries to catch his attention with a purring little meow. It won't do, having animals getting injuries from—well, he supposes Crawly is venomous. Aziraphale's never thought to check.

The cat's purr reaches a shivering crescendo. As he turns, surprised, an angel blooms in the space where the white Persian had occupied.

"Hello, Zira," Raphael says.

He doesn't appreciate the nickname, but he's always liked her, of all the archangels. She is, after all, his guiding commander — even if she delegates administrative duties to Gabriel.

"Raphael," he says, filled with relief. "It's good you came, there was—"

She lifts a broad hand, silencing him with a wistful smile.

"I've come here for an important reason," she says softly.

"Anything."

Raphael's smile twists a little at the edges like it might threaten to vanish at any moment.

He wonders what message of import she has brought. Surely…

"Take me around the city," she asks. It's a request, but he can't disobey, even if he had wanted.

They walk together, in the dark twilight of the night. The city stretches out before them, the beginning of a perilous question. Raphael doesn't speak. She's coy at the best of times, and stony at the worst, but now he knows that she is somewhere between, stuck in the endless ruminations of a black mood and the cautious optimism of a bright one.

He talks. He explains to her the layout of the city, softly at first. It doesn't take much for him to warm to the topic of humanity, and he finds himself talking proudly about the interpersonal conflicts and developments that he has witnessed unfurl before him. She nods as if to prompt him to continue, and he does. He talks about the people that he's met, their sparks of generosity and kindness, the way they have accepted him into their midst although he was a stranger, their art, their courage in the face of brutality, and, God Almighty above, how delicious their food is. He's describing in detail the preparation of a dish of salted lamb with lemongrass when she interrupts.

"And the healing? Was that a part of your directive?"

The words choke the air in his throat more effectively than if she had slapped him.

Raphael is looking at him, her round face not unkind in the dim moonlight.

She's waiting. For an answer. That he doesn't have.

Her grey eyes slide from him to the rest of the city, wandering slowly over buildings and features. They’re standing in the square. The public executions have ceased some years ago, as the Elamites grew complacent in their command. But he remembers each one vividly. The tang of blood spraying through the air, the low, uneasy cheer of the crowd, the quiet weeping of the families.

She's waiting for an answer that he has never had.

"Oh, Aziraphale," she sighs. Her disappointment weighs on him more heavily than any chiding, any reprimand, ever would. "This can't continue."

"It won't," he promises quickly, "I'll stop healing, I can just — help with the delivery normally."

 _Bilha would have bled out,_ he thinks, feeling as if his brain and his mouth and his heart suddenly exist across separate forms. Three separate planes of existence, each struggling to return to him.

_Leah would be dead of dysentery._

_Miriam had the God-forsaken plague._

Raphael has a curiously soft expression on her face as he regains focus. She gestures with a large hand to the hill above Gomorrah, the hill that settles above the plain like a splendid, verdant jewel. "Go there," she says, "She will let you know her wisdom." With a flick, her radiant six wings extend from her back, and Raphael is gone.

It hadn't been a request. Even a fake, polite one.

Still feeling like his organs have been displaced, Aziraphale does nothing but what he's been told. He ascends.

The knoll is quiet and empty. He hadn't expected anyone to be here anyway, but it pricks at one part of him. His heart, he thinks, wherever that had gone.

He stands and looks down at the green field. At the two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. They look glorious, sprawled out on each corner of the field. Close enough to touch at their nearest point, and far enough to be strangers at their furthest. They are glorious, two beautiful, imperfect marks of humanity.

The Dead Sea lurks behind.

He's never been to Sodom, he realises.

"I'm sorry," he says eventually. The silence is too much to bear, even though he knows he ought not to speak. "I thought I was put there to save them." He pauses and adds, "I still have another few years, I can - I can manage without performing miracles if it displeases You. It's my fault."

It’s not enough. It’s never enough. He will only realise this in another four thousand and sixty years. He does not know, now.

Which is why, when a bolt of lightning hits Sodom, Aziraphale flinches sharply. His brain, heart and mouth snap back to him. Too late. Too late.

"Lord? Please, it was my fault," he says, tripping over the words, "Give me more time, please, or, or, assign it to a better angel, please, Lord. I made a mistake, I know — please, Almighty one, let Raphael or, or, Azrael, or Uriel take over."

The dawn is dark red, the sun rising sickly and pale in the sky.

When the first lightning bolt hits Gomorrah, he’s still begging Her to take pity on them.

"They’re _fragile_ ,” he babbles, beseeching Her mercy, “they don’t understand the gift of eternity, it’s in their nature to be self-centred and pleasure driven, _please_ , they _can_ be redeemed, they just need more _time—_ ”

She responds finally with a howling scream of thunder. Lightning splits the sky in half and engulfs the second city, Gomorrah, his home for twelve years, completely.

Then the tornados begin. The hailstorm. The wind that whips it all into a horrifying fervour.

The fires that break out afterwards seem like an afterthought to the frisson of destruction and death that has been wrought upon them.

He doesn't breathe. He doesn't move. He stares, with a wide, unsteady gaze. At Gomorrah. At Sodom. At the wisdom of the Lord. At Her ineffable mercy.

When the rising torrents of fire, the screaming, the reek of burnt flesh clears — only the city of Zoar is left standing on the far edge of the once green landscape.

He stands on the ashen knoll, buries his head in his hands, and weeps.

 

* * *

 

They don’t tell you to stand up-wind of a burning city.

They don’t tell you about the grit, the compact human excrement, the ribbon strands of shrivelled sinew, that all gets caught up by the wind.

They don’t tell you much of anything at all, really.

 

* * *

 

Crawly finds him there about a week hence. He’s stopped crying. His white wings are slick with gore and grey with dust. He doesn’t look away from the ruin, doesn’t look towards his great adversary who, at any given moment, might choose to kill him.

His great adversary doesn’t say anything. Instead, the living embodiment of the original sin lets out a soft, incredulous noise. Like a constrained hiss.

Then, he's silent.

“It’s inutterable,” the angel chokes out. His fingers are filthy with grit, digging into the soft flesh beneath his eyes. “It’s _inutterable_.” He doesn’t know why he needs to justify it to the demon, why he needs to justify the Great Plan, why he needs to give reasons for the blight and fury of God’s wroth. It just spills out of him. “Her Plan, all Her plans, they’re all — they’re all for a greater purpose — we just can’t see it,” he knows he’s babbling. "I'm just not, I just can't—there's a purpose. To this. To everything."

His throat still hurts, parched like a grass fire. The Flood hadn’t felt like this. Not before the waters rose and then, afterwards, he’d looked away from the bodies, hadn’t wanted to look — but this? This?

Raphael called it a _cleansing_. She had come by briefly to look and then she tried to steady him with a warm hand. But her reminder to come back to them, to step away from humanity, was cool. _You’ve been down here for nearly two thousand years, Aziraphale. I’ll get you a promotion_ , she promised, _my treat. Don’t look so sad. Don't cry for them._

Michael had been far less kind. She swept by on day three, incandescent with fury. _You’ll sow dissent,_ she hissed. _Weeping over God’s actions. Who do you think you are? Do you need a reminder, Azirapha-el?_

“If you think so,” Crawly says. He has one, dark wing shielding himself from the ashes that still drift with the wind. It’s large enough to shield Aziraphale, too.

“It doesn’t matter what I _think_ , it just _is_ — it just, it just is. You know what I mean?”

“Hmm.”

He presses on, ignoring the demon, well past the point of borderline and in genuine hysterics, “Her Plan is too — too great, too good, to be put in words — it's all just—you know what the humans call Her? Jehovah, some of then call Her Jehovah — they say, they say Her real name, her real Form is, is, is," he pauses to drag in a desperate, dusty breath, " _inutterable_.”

“I don’t think that’s a word,” Crawly replies. “Inutterable, that is. I think you should stick with ineffable.”

“Ineffable,” he repeats softly, staring at the gap in the world where two great cities had once stood.

He expects Crawly to say something further, to ridicule him for the tracks of tears suddenly bleeding through the ash on his face.

Crawly doesn’t say anything. His gold eyes are examining the barren, bleak landscape with a glint of some, nameless emotion.

Aziraphale feels a hysterical giggle build in his throat and can't quite stop his mouth in time.

Gold eyes turn on him, and Crawly shakes his head. He starts walking towards Zoar. He’s a few paces away before he turns back and says sharply, “Well? Are you coming?”

“With you?” the angel asks, stunned at the boldness of his enemy. “No. Of course not.”

Crawly’s wings extend, his uppermost feathers quivering. Dust spurts from them with one gust. He throws up both hands above his head as if the angel is a recalcitrant child.

“Going to join the salt pillars in their eternal vigil, then?” Crawly snaps. “It’s not a good look, I’ll tell you that for free.”

Aziraphale says nothing. He’s not looking at where the cities used to lie, though; he’s looking at Crawly.

“Go to Zoar,” Crawly says, “Have a drink. Have several drinks.” Then he turns and walks away. “And wash your damn face!” he calls over his shoulder, shrinking his wings with a brisk shrug.

He looks like any other man walking along the field. Except that the field is covered in burning, toxic ash and Crawly breathes it in like it’s clean air.

 _It’s ineffable,_ Aziraphale tells himself, like a desperate eulogy, like the tolling of a distant, nameless bell: _it’s ineffable, it’s ineffable, it’s ineffable, all of it, all of this, what I feel, it’s all ineffable._

 

* * *

 

Aziraphale doesn’t go to Zoar. He doesn’t go back to Heaven. He doesn’t know where he goes. It has one road choked with dust, and an inn that has a bath and a bed.

He does wash his face. And his wings. The human way, with animal and vegetable oils with alkaline salts and hot, then warm, then cold water. He washes again, and again, and again until the innkeeper's wife comes to scold him for wasting precious water and remarks on the raw flesh on his back with concern. He soothes her easily: she departs without a thought as to why she came, beyond a vague sense of contentment.

He doesn’t think about God’s Plans. He tries not to think too much about anything at all. He does, briefly, consider the glint in Crawly’s eyes. At the time, Aziraphale thinks it’s fear - fear of the Almighty and what She could do, should She choose to reclaim Her fallen angels.

A few thousand years later, Aziraphale has seen that look many times, knows it well. But he never thinks about that moment, again. He does not think of the ashen field. He does not think about the first time he feels a city of people bound in viscera across his skin.

He will not think about it. He cannot think about it.

**Author's Note:**

> [1]Crawly’s words might have been more accurately transcribed as, “WAUT AUR YOUW DAUNG NUER THAU DEAUF SAE DISTIMMA YAER?” given the dialect, the fact that he had been deliberately putting it on and the fact that he had his mouth half-full with drink.


End file.
